Not the Teddy Bear’s Fault
Marco:
Anyway, we should start the show while I'm not coughing, which is a very brief window of time.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
There it is.
Marco:
There it is.
Casey:
Comedy, ladies and gentlemen.
Casey:
It's all about timing.
Casey:
All about timing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So while Marco is dying, let's let's let's cover the most important piece of follow up right up top.
Casey:
Is it Yanny or Laurel?
Casey:
Go ahead, John.
John:
I don't like that one as much as the dress, although I had a thought about both the dress and that Yanni Laurel thing.
John:
They both kind of, the sound one much more than the visual one, but they both highlight the fact that even though we're all reading the same internet,
John:
the output devices we're all using vary so incredibly widely um visual ones less than the auditory ones but both vary a lot like we all think like you know i looked at this picture and i think x and i looked at the picture and i think y like with the dress thing right but we're not all looking at the same picture this is setting aside for a moment the input device like ourselves like the people vary from person to person which is also more true of the auditory one than the visual one i think
John:
Uh, just due to people getting old and they're hearing going bad, uh, uh, versus color, uh, you know, sensing colors, which probably changes age, but maybe not as much.
John:
Setting aside the person, the device that we're looking at, monitors have different gamma.
John:
You're looking at a different lighting condition, so on and so forth.
John:
But speakers, especially in the smartphone age, vary incredibly widely.
John:
So for something like the Annie Laurel thing, where it changes based on how much, where the frequency cutoff is, right?
John:
Get rid of all the bass.
John:
It sounds like one thing.
John:
Get rid of all the high frequencies.
John:
It sounds like the other.
John:
And I think that makes that one more boring to me, but it shows like the reason people are so convinced is because they think we're all listening to the same sound and we're not.
John:
The sound you get out of your tinny, crappy phone speakers is very different than the sound you get out of your, you know, desktop speakers or your laptop speakers or whatever.
John:
And then of course the input device, if you have cold or you have trouble hearing a certain frequencies or whatever.
John:
Um, so anyway, uh, I think it's, I think it's dumb.
John:
I think the stress one was also dumb, but slightly less dumb because, uh,
John:
You could look at the same picture and convince yourself one way or the other, but the audio one...
John:
If the frequencies are not getting through your ear, there's not much you can do to convince yourself it sounds like the other one, whereas the same picture you could go back and forth on.
John:
If you change the frequency cutoff so it's kind of in the middle, you can hear both of them, but that's like altering the sound.
Casey:
I have heard all of the different variations of hearing both of them.
Casey:
Well, I've heard many of the variations, and I can only hear one.
Casey:
But, John, you haven't answered the question.
John:
No, it's called the New York Times one.
John:
If you do a hard frequency cutoff of all the low or all the high, it's impossible to hear the other one at the extremes.
John:
So what did you hear?
John:
So anyway, it also shows how crappy people's speakers are because I have no speakers that I own that can make me hear the one with all the low frequencies cut off.
John:
I guess all of my speakers, including my crappy ear pods and all of my iOS devices, have enough bass in them that I can't get it to sound like the one with just high frequencies.
Marco:
Well, part of that's also that all your speakers are ancient.
Casey:
Like your ears.
Marco:
Yeah, like new speakers from a lot of different people, especially speakers in smartphones, as you mentioned, they do a lot of processing to try to make up for the inherent crappiness of a speaker that's that small and or cheap.
Marco:
If you actually profile, if you play a test sound out of the iPhone speaker and profile it with some kind of measurement thing, it's shocking how flat of a response curve it doesn't have.
Marco:
They do a heck of a lot of processing with almost all modern phone speakers and anything like the home voice assistant cylinders and everything.
Marco:
There's so much processing to try to make up for physics and economics that you want a very small device, but you want it to sound great.
Marco:
Whereas older speakers, they didn't have the electronic resources to do that kind of processing.
Marco:
So they just rely on like physics and quality and size.
Marco:
And so, you know, old speakers, like you will never have like the kind of processing, unless something's really going wrong, maybe with the crossover or something, but you would never have the kind of processing that would heavily alter that sound to sound that different to people.
Marco:
That being said, people's hearing is also very different, as you mentioned.
Marco:
And it changes throughout your life as well.
Marco:
We all know that young people can hear higher frequencies than older people.
Marco:
But also, your hearing does not have a flat frequency response curve either.
Marco:
You have peaks and valleys in certain frequencies you hear more strongly than others or have more distortion than others.
Marco:
And that's just the realities of us being these big bags of analog meat.
Yeah.
Casey:
Wait, but John, you never actually answered the question, did you?
John:
It's pronounced Syracusa.
John:
Like I said, in its normal form, being unmodified, not using one of those tools that actually cuts off frequencies in the source sound, but just playing it through all my speakers, playing it through my AirPods, playing it through my phone speaker, my iPad speakers, my laptop speakers, it's lower for me all the time.
John:
And I have to really cut off a lot of the low frequencies before it switches to Yanni.
John:
Like at the source, not in, you know...
John:
So I don't have any speakers that have so little bass, or to Marco's point, I don't have any speakers that do not massively process the sound to make sure that there is some bass to ever hear the Ani one.
John:
And I am old, so obviously the high frequencies are probably much less audible to me than they are to younger people.
John:
So maybe my speakers are playing them, I just can't hear them.
Casey:
marco i know what you're talking about but only just barely and i didn't listen all right well at this very moment you can drop in a clip for the listeners to hear exactly what i'm talking about laurel laurel uh but basically it's like the blue what was it blue and gold dress where you can either hear one thing or hear another although obviously the dress was seeing one thing or seeing another but
John:
but like it would be like the dress one but they'd say oh but if you can't see the other color apply this filter that turns everything blue don't you see it blue now it's like yeah of course i see it blue now because you changed the source right so the ones like if you can't hear it the other way cut off all the low frequencies oh great well you're right now it sounds different good job you changed the source all right hold on let me listen to it one sec
John:
The New York Times one is the best because it has a slider for frequency cutoff.
John:
So if you leave it in the middle... All right, one sec.
John:
I'll listen to it, but I won't be able to hear you.
John:
One sec.
John:
Yery.
John:
Yery.
John:
Okay, it's clearly Laurel.
John:
It's not even close.
John:
Right, but that's just the speaker.
John:
So go to the ones that have the cutoff.
John:
And the worst part is... All right, hold on.
Casey:
Hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Laurel.
Casey:
Laurel.
Casey:
Laurel.
John:
Laurel.
John:
Laurel.
Casey:
Yery.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Oh, I can kind of, sort of hear Yanni, kind of, when I crank it all the way over.
Marco:
Yeah, so listening in my regular headphones through my decent setup, not even my good headphones, my regular headphones, I can only hear Yanni on the New York Times one in the rightmost two notches, like the far right and the one right before it.
Marco:
And the one right before it is really kind of a crossover point anyway.
Marco:
So you really got to go pretty far right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think the middle is the like unmodified.
John:
I forget what the unmodified is.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The middle is like not frequency modified.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Let's bring it back to the show.
Casey:
So we left the show on you going to listen to it as far as I'm concerned.
John:
You don't know when we left the show.
John:
Marco decides when we leave the show.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Just work with me here.
Casey:
It's power.
Marco:
So there's no question it's Laurel.
Marco:
If you're not hearing Laurel, you have seriously messed up speakers or ears.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I'm not going to judge your speakers or ears.
Marco:
But just so you know, they're not normal.
John:
Although I have something to add to what you hear.
John:
The thing that really makes this sound also not great is when you hear Laurel, it sounds like someone saying someone's name or, you know, because that's what it sounds like.
John:
When you hear Yanny, it does not really sound like a human anymore.
John:
It sounds like an audio artifact or a heavily processed person's voice.
John:
It's been pitch shifted.
John:
It does not sound like a person saying that because no one who is saying that word would say it in such a weird way.
John:
So I feel like at its root,
John:
This recording is someone saying Laurel with lots of high-frequency noise that happens to sound like a word in the same way that when you play stuff backwards, sometimes it sounds like other words.
Casey:
So I had only ever heard Laurel until you pointed out this New York Times thing.
Casey:
And when I crank it all the way to the right-hand side, which is Yanni or Yanni or whatever, however you pronounce it, I can sort of kind of hear it, but it's still difficult for me to get it.
Casey:
To me, it is so unequal.
Casey:
The raw version is so...
John:
unequivocally laurel that it stupefies me that anyone can hear anything different yeah so it's got to be either we're all old enough that our high frequency hearing is shot and i think i forget when your high frequency hearing really falls off a cliff but we might all be past that age we're not or people are using speakers that really have just no bass whatsoever and they are processing and so all they get is the high frequencies and then it sounds like some mutant alien saying
Marco:
I mean, basically, where you might where you probably hear it, I'm not going to test an app, but where you'd probably hear it is using the built in speaker on a phone, because that's that's an area where like you have a tiny little speaker that is it's pretty much impossible to get bass out of out of like the built in speaker on the, you know, seven millimeter thick side of a phone like that's you're never going to get bass out of that.
Marco:
So it makes total sense that maybe out of phone speakers, especially crappier ones, then, you know, you might hear that.
Marco:
But any kind of like headphone or regular size speaker, I can't see how you could.
John:
Yeah, not on my phone.
John:
So on my phone, it's 100% Laurel to me.
Marco:
Keep in mind, you know, also like Apple speakers have been really good recently.
Marco:
Like in the last few years, the physical speakers and Apple products have gotten significantly better than not only than where they were before, but where the competition is.
Marco:
So anybody on an iPhone, you're probably not hearing what other people are hearing here if they're listening on their phones.
John:
So the next time one of these things comes up,
John:
depending on what it is just remember the like the key fat the the thing that kills the source of fascination is the idea that we're all experiencing the same thing and coming away with different impressions and that's not true we're all experiencing different things and then on top of that
John:
Even if we were experiencing the same thing, we would have different impressions of it.
John:
But the key, the part that really kills all these is we're not looking at the same picture, and we're not hearing the same, you know, sound waves going through the air.
John:
And after that, there's even more crap.
John:
But even before that, like, the whole premise of the fascination is killed.
John:
Maybe if we have...
John:
You know, if Apple ruled the world and everything was carefully color corrected at the factory for all of us, maybe it would be closer.
John:
But, you know, it's like when you go see someone else's television set, just, you know, output devices vary widely and input devices also.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We have plenty of Google follow-up to do, but before we get there, we have a little bit of a Race to Listen follow-up.
Casey:
Ricky Bright writes in to say, Race to Listen is a big, capital B-I-G, according to Ricky, deal for China as it's a pain to type.
Casey:
The default behavior makes sense there.
Casey:
Maybe change the default based on the region.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Bob Burrow, who I guess was an ex-Apple employee or something like that, wrote on Twitter that instead of just crawling websites, Google is going to start crawling people.
Casey:
That is deeply disturbing and also accurate.
John:
That was in reference to Google having automated calls to businesses to find out what their hours are on holidays or whatever.
John:
And it really is.
John:
The web crawler visits their websites periodically and updates their Google search index and stuff like that.
John:
And I guess their web crawler would be crawling websites and trying to pull holiday hours and hours from the website so Google can surface that to people who are doing searches.
John:
But in cases where they can't get that information, they will stop crawling the web.
John:
And I like this, you know, this of crawling people saying we are Google and our computers may contact you to extract information from you for the purpose of serving that information to millions of people who search for things.
John:
And.
John:
It sounds creepy.
John:
Oh, it is creepy.
John:
Well, you know, like I said about the creepiness, things that initially sound creepy eventually just come to get used to.
John:
As a user of the service, I can see the value in having accurate information.
John:
That would otherwise be impossible to get without doing it by a human.
John:
I guess the Amazon way to do it would be to hire a bunch of low wage people who are whose life is partially funded by governed subsidies.
John:
So you can pay them less than a living wage and have them call all the businesses and find out the answers.
John:
And the Google way is to pay a small number of people to write a program to do that same job.
Casey:
That's a pretty accurate summary.
Casey:
Michael Love writes, another Google Assistant voice call issue, isn't it recording the call?
Casey:
And so wouldn't it be running afoul of the law in two party consent states?
Casey:
What that means, and I'm not a lawyer, what that means is you can only record a conversation if both parties have agreed to the fact that it's going to be recorded.
Casey:
If it's not recording a call, the call continues, Michael, how can I check its work and make sure the appointment was actually made as I requested?
Marco:
Although I will say that if you're wanting to listen to the recordings of the call that were placed on your behalf, then maybe you shouldn't be placing these calls through a robot.
John:
That kind of seems to ruin the point of the convenience of this.
John:
Well, that's the accessibility angle, like I was saying before, that I imagine in cases where you need the computer to help you make a call just as an assistive device, you would want to participate, not just listen to it afterwards, but be there when it's happening.
John:
Again, so you can nudge the conversation in a particular direction because you...
John:
you are you are trying to use it as an assistive device you are not delegating responsibility to do this right so but anyway as for the recording thing i assume it's not recording for the reasons they said like it just doesn't seem like a thing you can do because it's it's using regular phone lines and the laws having to do with regular phone lines or from a bygone era when we made laws that tried to protect people's privacy and they're much stricter for what you can do over telephones than they are what you can do over the internet the internet you can do whatever the hell you want to get you can get away with but
John:
The laws for phones are very clear.
John:
So I imagine they're not recording it, which I think, as I said last week, if you're trusting this thing to be successful, like if I, you know, I've talked about how I had trouble with phone trees when they first came out.
John:
But I think for something like this, especially in the beginning, since it's going to fail so much of the time, say I used this thing and said, you know, hey, dingus, make me an appointment, make me a reservation, a restaurant, blah, blah, blah.
John:
i would spend the rest of the day wondering whether the the confirmation that it has made that reservation for me is true i'd be like but did you like and you'd wonder and you get to the restaurant you'd be like god my phone told me it made a reservation but the thing breaks all the time did it actually make a reservation and you would get there and be like we had no have no idea who you are we have no idea what reservation you're talking to and what are you going to say
John:
i think i told my phone to call you yeah what evidence do you have of that look look at this message that just says that's just a text message that didn't call us at all it's like no but i told it this and then it called you behind the scenes and then it told me i had a reservation and you're like well your phone lied to you like i don't know i wouldn't i just wouldn't trust it and to trust something like that kind of like you know the difference between
John:
siri in the early days and maybe still today and and the amazon echo is you learn to trust it after it's successful a lot of times right like you just you realize oh the the the echo can hear me and it does do what i asked uh so the first couple of times you're a little bit shaky eventually you come to trust it but like i said i i don't think uh people are going to come to trust this because i think its reliability will be very very low
Casey:
So to go back a half step with regard to recording, we don't know if they are being recorded as far as I'm aware anyway.
Casey:
But a friend of the show, Matt Drance, wrote a couple of tweets about this.
Casey:
And so Matt writes, so I have some questions about this section of the Duplex blog post.
Casey:
And he posts a screenshot in a link.
Casey:
And the summary of the screenshot is that Google is saying that Duplex is capable of carrying out sophisticated conversations and it completes the majority of its tasks fully autonomously without human involvement.
Casey:
The system has a self-monitoring capability, which allows it to recognize the tasks that cannot complete autonomously.
Casey:
And in this case, it signals to a human operator who can complete the task.
Casey:
To train the system in a new domain, we use real-time supervised training.
Casey:
This is comparable to the training practices of many disciplines, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But what Matt points out is, and now I'm quoting from him.
Casey:
So you throw a request over the fence to assistant, which may or may not bring a total stranger into the call with my doctor, my therapist, my lawyer.
Casey:
Please tell me I'm missing something.
Casey:
And that was a use case or not really use case, but that was just a wrinkle that I had never even considered, which I thought was really fascinating is, you know, we're potentially exposing really, really private information or data, I guess, about ourselves to potentially humans at Google that we may not particularly want to have that information about.
John:
But you don't have to worry about that because the user agreement that make you blindly click through to get to it signs over all your rights to every piece of privacy in your entire life to Google and says that you agree that it's okay that Google knows everything about you.
John:
So don't worry.
John:
Google won't get in trouble.
Casey:
True.
Casey:
But I don't know, it just seemed really, really weird to me.
Casey:
And it's tough because I do appreciate, as we mentioned last episode, as you mentioned, John, a minute ago, I do appreciate that there are people for whom this could be a just world-changing product in that, you know, you either are incapable of using the phone or perhaps using the phone is very, very difficult or something like that.
Casey:
And so for an accessibility purpose, this is really, really brilliant technology.
Casey:
But I think the thing that we all keep coming back to, and I don't remember if it was Marco or maybe Jason or Mike on Upgrade.
Casey:
Somebody said recently, you know, the thing that I think we all find most creepy is that it's not identifying itself as a computer, which brings us to our next bit of follow up.
Casey:
Google says it's human sounding robot will identify itself on the phone calls.
Casey:
So apparently Google noticed that the Internet was not happy.
Casey:
And they're saying that, you know, that in the future they will identify themselves as non-human at some point during the call.
John:
That really takes the wind out of their sails, though, because most of the wow factor of that demo was the fact that the computer sounded a lot like a person down to the pauses and the ums and the whatever.
John:
If you take out the ums and, you know, just leave the time gap pauses, it really highlights the parts where you notice that this thing on the other end of the line says the same word exactly the same way every time, like it doesn't have much variety, right?
John:
You can tell it's artificial, and the ums really sell it, but...
John:
if you're if it identifies itself as an automation but then it does um and stuff it's like come on come on computer like i don't have time for you to you know play human just you identified yourself as not human don't keep trying to do things the human do you know be efficient be a machine and get to get the job done make the sale make the reservation whatever
Casey:
Also, HeyUDVD just posted a link to Reddit in the chat, and I'm going to read this whole thing.
Casey:
It's not very long, but it's fascinating.
Casey:
It's titled, Today I Realized I Live in the Future, and it reads, I got a call at work today.
Casey:
A woman called me claiming to be Google Maps, and she wanted to know our opening hours.
Casey:
We went through what hours we were open for, weekdays, clarified the weekends, and said goodbye.
Casey:
She never told me her name, and her responses were a bit odd, but I put it down to a language or cultural barrier that
Casey:
though she spoke very cleanly in English, as her accent was Southeast Asian and I live in Australia.
Casey:
It was otherwise unremarkable.
Casey:
I told the store manager, I'm an assistant manager, and their first response was, was it a person?
Casey:
I said, yeah, of course.
Casey:
He said, are you sure?
Casey:
Then it dawned on me, I checked Google and our hours were already updated, but one day was slightly wrong.
Casey:
It's logistically impossible to have the manpower to call every establishment and confirm their opening hours.
Casey:
I wasn't talking to someone from Google Maps.
Casey:
I was talking to Google Maps.
Casey:
I was talking to a computer and I had absolutely no idea.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
Yeah, the main thing these things have going for them in terms of making people think they're humans is that humans have widely varying behavior on the phone, right?
John:
Especially with the fidelity of phone lines, you can't hear the sort of audio artifacting and like computeriness of the actual speech synthesis.
John:
It all just becomes mush over a pot system.
John:
And then you're just left with, oh, this person just sounded weird.
John:
And maybe they weren't a native speaker, but they didn't have an accent.
John:
But anyway, people are weird, whatever.
Casey:
A couple of quick topics to start us off.
Casey:
First, I wanted to recognize that on Recode, actually a couple of weeks ago almost, there was a post which is entitled, Amazon employees are outraged by their company's opposition to a plan to add more diversity to its board.
Casey:
And my understanding of this entire story is that Amazon did the same thing Apple did, which is they said, no, no, no, we're not going to go out of our way to add diversity to our board.
Casey:
Our board is our board and basically go screw yourselves.
Casey:
But apparently a whole bunch of Amazon employees have been getting really angry about this.
Casey:
And seemingly Amazon has said, OK, no, actually, we'll take this seriously and we'll try to make our board a little more diverse.
Casey:
And I just wanted to call attention to this because Apple has gone through this exact same thing.
Casey:
And they basically told us to pound sand.
Casey:
And well, not us specifically, but they've told the people who have brought this complaint to pound sand.
Casey:
And I just find that kind of gross.
Casey:
And I just wanted to say that, hey, this is kind of cool that Amazon is doing something that Apple refuses to.
Casey:
And that's neat.
John:
I still think it's, like I said when we last discussed this, little actually to do with the nature of the shareholder proposal.
John:
It doesn't matter what it is, we should all wear blue hats on Wednesday, and a lot to do with the fact that
John:
Companies like Amazon and Apple and any big company does not want to be told what to do by a section of shareholders.
John:
Right.
John:
They'll be told what to do by majority shareholders or a very large percentage shareholders.
John:
But small activist group of shareholders trying to tell the company what to do, not just like.
John:
broadly speaking but specifically you must agree to this plan and it becomes a thing that you have to do as a public company they don't want to be bossed around so you're not the boss of me right and so it looks bad when the thing they're telling you to do is probably a thing that you want to do like apple has tons of diversity initiatives and so on and so forth but these things usually come down to you must do exactly x y and z and apple says all right we want to if we want to improve diversity on our board we want to do it our way we don't want the terms to be dictated to we don't want
John:
you small group of shareholders to convince a larger group to vote for this thing and now we're beholden to your exact plan of an exact uh you know milestones and everything um and so it's not a good look for any of the companies and they should amazon seems like they're handling it much better but i bet the outcome is amazon says we now have a new program to improve the diversity of our board but it won't be they won't be bound by it in the same way they would have been if all the shareholders voted for this thing you know what i mean
John:
So that's why these companies just reflexively recommend against any shareholder recommendation to do anything ever because shareholders are not the boss of them until they are.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so rounding out the Casey complaints about every public company episode.
Casey:
Twitter is a bunch of jerks.
Casey:
And as much as I love Twitter, basically they can go themselves because they have announced today as we record that they are replacing the the API they provide that that basically is behind any of the third party Twitter clients that any of us may use.
Casey:
And they're replacing it with their Twitter's account activity API, which is not nearly as full featured as what it replaces and is hilariously expensive.
Casey:
So Sean Heber of the Twitterific folks at Icon Factory, he wrote, the public pricing that I'm seeing shows Twitter's account activity API pricing is $2,899 a month to get activity updates for...
Casey:
250 users.
Casey:
Needless to say, we have more than 250 users.
Casey:
It's possible an enterprise deal could be made, but it seems likely to be affordable.
Casey:
And so you can assume that Twitterific, that Tweetbot has many, many thousands of users, if not tens of thousands of users.
Casey:
And you can see how this quickly becomes unsustainable.
Casey:
And in fact, friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry wrote, the math works out to about $10 per user per month to get push notifications.
Casey:
And that means that they would have to, in order to stay afloat, they would have to push that cost down to all of their users.
Casey:
So Craig continues, on a platform where people balk at spending 99 cents.
John:
Don't forget about Apple's 30% cut.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So it's really like, what is it, $15, $16 or something like that per user per month.
Casey:
It's just not tenable.
Casey:
And so, you know, Gruber wrote earlier tonight, and I don't have the quote in front of me at the moment, but he had a really good analogy, and he said in so many words, it's like breaking up with somebody by just being a really, really big jerk until they go away.
Casey:
That's kind of what Twitter's doing with third-party clients right now.
Casey:
And it just...
Casey:
It not only makes me sad, but it makes me frigging angry.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I'm going through the five stages, right?
Casey:
But it just makes me angry because it seems unnecessary.
Casey:
Like, they already have something that is working.
Casey:
And it doesn't seem like they're doing a lot to update it.
Casey:
I can't imagine that just keeping it working as is is that terribly expensive or difficult.
Casey:
But they really want to tell all of the third-party developers to, as I said earlier, pound sand.
Casey:
And it's just frustrating.
John:
I saw the thread that Craig linked to.
John:
There was some party from Twitter saying, oh, well, we have a new set of microservices that are implemented in a more robust way and we're transitioning to them.
John:
That could be a reason.
John:
But the most frustrating thing to me from the outside of looking at this eternal struggle between third-party developers and Twitter is...
John:
that twitter does things that affect third-party clients and explains them in a way that never mentions third-party clients they always explain like we're doing this for this reason and for that or whatever it's like yeah but you see how it's doing this bad thing hey twitter how you feel about this bad thing that is it a side effect you know you can't say you're not aware of it you know it's happening last time i remember they were going to do this and said oh we have to think about it for a while like we'll delay it and i was like how does that help you all you're doing is trying to wait until about it for like three weeks
John:
Yeah, we're waiting for the bad PR to die down and just do the same thing again.
John:
And it's like, address it head on.
John:
I think I said this in the Rectives episode where Merlin and I were yelling about Twitter clients.
John:
Like, decide what you want.
John:
Do you want third party clients or do you not?
John:
If you don't want them, get rid of them.
John:
If you do want them, support them.
John:
But like, you know, address the issue head on instead of just constantly saying other things other than...
John:
You know, people out there saying you're killing us and they're like, we're really improving our API and blah, blah, blah.
What?
John:
You have to talk to those people.
John:
You have to say you have to say we're sorry, but that's just the way it is.
John:
You should stop making third party clients.
John:
So you have to say we're sorry and we won't do this.
John:
But instead of saying, well, actually, we're doing it for this reason.
John:
I don't care what reason you're doing it for.
John:
These are the effects that it's having and you should address them head on and they don't seem capable of doing it.
Marco:
I mean, I have a slightly different take on this.
Marco:
First of all, there was a great alternative take on Connected this week, led, I think, mostly by Mike, where basically saying this kind of doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
Even if you use these apps, none of these things should be deal killers for you as a user.
Marco:
Now, whether they are for the apps is a different story.
Marco:
But as the user, this is not the end of the world, probably.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the DM one is kind of the end of the world.
Marco:
Now you've got to use a different app for DMs.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a bigger problem.
Marco:
But it's easy for us as fans and users, well, as users of Twitter, it's easy for us who have been using third-party Twitter apps forever to look at this and to look at the continued slow jerkiness of Twitter towards third-party apps since like 2012 and
Marco:
uh and to to ascribe all their actions to this motive of like gruber's excellent analogy of like you know like somebody who's just trying to break up with their significant other and just being a jerk about instead of just telling them and that could be possible that that could be what's happening here that's what he's like that's what it's like not that that's their motivation because again if their motivation was to get rid of third-party clients they would just do it it's it's like that they're this is
John:
from the outside it seems like that's what's happening but like neglect or like just not caring or apathy or you know just equally uh you know reasonable explanations but from the outside it just seems to us that they're just being a jerk and we're trying to figure out why are you trying to be a jerk either break up with us or don't right but but i think ultimately though i think it is you know a combination of ignorance and apathy and just like because look at the way twitter runs the rest of twitter
Marco:
You think they could have a coherent vision and solid plan that ran from 2012 until now about anything?
Marco:
Twitter doesn't even understand Twitter themselves.
Marco:
They don't even understand the basics of their own service.
Marco:
They're barely keeping that company running.
Marco:
They're barely keeping the product usable.
Marco:
They're actively fighting against the product and its users all the time with tons of crazy mismanagement, horrible directions they go in and then abandon.
Marco:
Twitter sucks at running Twitter.
Marco:
So I think it's very, very likely that the actual causes of their behavior here are not some gradual plan to kill third party apps.
Marco:
I think they just are doing things that they see as reactionary to other forces, other API desires or other platform initiatives or God knows what else they call it.
Marco:
that happened to hit third-party apps on the way, but I don't think anybody influential inside Twitter gives two seconds of thought to any third-party apps.
Marco:
So I think all of this is just collateral damage from things inside that have nothing to do with them at all.
John:
Last time they did delay the thing, though.
John:
They were like, oh, people are angry.
John:
They immediately had a reply and said, I see lots of people are angry.
John:
We'll sure that we'll give you 90 days notice.
John:
That was an immediate reaction.
John:
So I think they are hearing it, but they're kind of spindler style.
John:
You guys don't get that reference.
John:
They're hiding under their desk when the people get angry.
John:
And they're like, we realize something we're doing is making some people angry.
John:
I don't care about those people, but I don't like being yelled at.
John:
So if I just hide under my desk for a while...
John:
and then like wait are they calmed down now okay let's go back to what we were doing because they don't care and you're right there's no there's no six year sustained plan to do anything at twitter but the frustrating thing corporate communication wise is you should at least address the issue people are mad at you about like every answer that i've seen from twitter about the specific issue never says head on anything about how about like the third party clients or whatever and so yeah it's it's just
John:
It's continued indecision and an indecision eventually becomes a decision and it becomes like, oh, in effect, you're being a jerk to us for six years and eventually we'll go away.
John:
But if if that is a goal of yours to get rid of third party clients, you would have done it already because you are entirely empowered to do it.
John:
So it's like it's not a goal and we don't like being yelled at.
John:
But if we do it eventually as a side effect of a bunch of other flailings that we're doing,
John:
We're mostly okay with that, but we'll never tell you any of this.
John:
And every time you ask about it, we'll just say something else about why we're making these changes.
John:
And I bet the reasons they're making the changes are true.
John:
I bet they are changing to new API endpoints that are better and have better performance.
John:
And I bet they are phasing out the old API endpoints because they were badly implemented and inefficient.
John:
All that is probably 100% true.
John:
but that's not what people want to hear they want to people want to hear yeah but by doing this you're having this effect how do you feel about that we don't like it we're being hurt by it can you help us out and last time they said whoa don't yell at us we'll take the time to think about this now they're just like okay how about now can we just do the same thing now it's just it's incredibly frustrating especially since as many people pointed out
John:
Like, oh, they want they don't want people to use third party clients that, you know, or at least they don't care about third party clients.
John:
First of all, most people don't use third party clients.
John:
So it's not like this is a big problem.
John:
Oh, half our user base is using third party clients.
John:
We can't control their user experience.
John:
No, it's not true.
John:
It's vanishing a small percentage.
John:
and second of all we want them to use our first party clients they're canned their first party clients for the mac so they just want people to use their website i guess which is their first party client ios you know they still have the client anyway they're they're they're just making a mess and you know it it's disappointing and i'm glad that a lot of the features that they're canning or destroying don't affect me that much because i don't care about notifications i don't have any push stuff enabled
John:
But DMs would affect me, and if I lose the ability to use Twitter DMs, I will just stop using Twitter DMs, and I'll just use something else for that, use iMessage or whatever, because I'm not going to use a DM API that has a three- to six-minute lag every time I send a message.
Casey:
It just makes me sad.
Casey:
I mean, to be honest, it's probably for the best that I slowly wean myself off Twitter because I spend too much damn time on it.
Casey:
But it just makes me sad.
Casey:
And again, it's, I guess, in a way, the same problem I have with the Google Duplex thing.
Casey:
Like, just call a spade a spade.
Casey:
You know, hi, this is a computer calling you on behalf of Casey List.
Casey:
I'd like to schedule an appointment, please.
Casey:
Hi, I'm Twitter, and I want third-party clients to go away.
Casey:
So this is what we're doing.
John:
If they want them to go away, they can make them go away.
John:
It's benign neglect.
Casey:
Well, I think the thing is they want them to go away, but they don't want to be the one with the smoking gun after it's over.
John:
If they want to not make people mad at them, the six-year strategy of making people constantly mad at them is not like those same people.
John:
Those people aren't like...
John:
If you had to say this was a strategy, it would be a strategy of barely appeasing them.
John:
But as Marco pointed out, the idea that Twitter had any six-year strategy that was consistent is ridiculous anyway.
John:
So it's not like they're consciously barely appeasing them, but in effect, because they're so reactive when people yell at them.
John:
They are always walking that line between just making people incredibly angry at them all the time and then slightly appease them a little bit and then angry.
John:
And meanwhile, the state of third-party Twitter clients just gets worse and worse over time.
Marco:
You know what we should do?
Marco:
We should just have all the white Nazis use third-party apps, and then they will get priority support, and Twitter will do everything they want.
John:
Oh, good thinking.
Marco:
And then all this stuff will get fixed.
Marco:
Brilliant idea.
John:
That reminds me of the hell-banning feature that they just added.
John:
Do you know about that Twitter added hell-banning?
John:
Do you know what hell-banning is?
Marco:
Yeah, where it's like where you post and you don't realize no one's seeing your stuff, but no one's seeing your stuff.
John:
yep so it's not actually quite that bad as that no one sees it but like basically uh they certain uh people's tweets do not appear in a thread like so if you're looking at a thread if anybody's looking at a thread and they participated in the thread certain people's tweets don't appear you know the bad people bot accounts nazis all that sort of stuff like that right which sounds like a good idea because it's like it's well
John:
it's you know it's been tried many times in forums and everything and it's kind of good if you don't like getting yelled at because what you're just hoping is that the people don't realize that they're hell banned that's the whole idea eventually in forums you people could realize but in twitter maybe they just think people are ignoring them and most of the time these are just like create a new account spew a bunch of invective get your account suspended repeat you know loop so no they'll never care right they're hell banned
John:
But the key with all these things is, OK, how does Twitter decide who gets hell banned?
John:
And the first place I saw anything having to do with hell banning on Twitter was because some person's account was hell banned because they like told a Nazi to go screw themselves.
John:
Right.
John:
That was the person who was hell banned.
John:
The person who told the Nazi to go screw themselves because they use like screw or something or said like an insulting word.
Yeah.
John:
The whole point of online trolls is they figure out how your system works, and then they make 500 sock puppet accounts to report your account and get it hell banned, and you don't notice.
John:
And so the concept of hell banning, I'm not entirely against, but the idea that Twitter would correctly identify the accounts to actually ban versus having the system entirely gamed by the bad people to essentially hell ban everyone else who's against them, it's just...
Marco:
there's so little that twitter could do these days where i where i think that the results of it will be an improvement to the service even when they ostensibly are doing more or less the right thing so anyway i'm assuming i'm hell banned right now sorry if you can't see my tweets we are sponsored this week by squarespace start building your website today at squarespace.com slash atp enter offer code atp at checkout to get 10 off make your next move with a beautiful website from squarespace
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Oh.
Casey:
What else happened at Google I.O.?
Casey:
We talked a whole lot about the Google Duplex thing.
Casey:
Was there anything else interesting that happened?
Casey:
What else went on?
Marco:
Well, first of all, let's preface that by saying, are any of us qualified to even know what's relevant, let alone to have seen enough of it to talk about it, let alone to talk about it well?
Marco:
I watched it.
Marco:
I did my homework.
Marco:
I assume you two didn't.
John:
No, of course not.
John:
I already gave 14 minutes of my life for that, and that was too many.
John:
Yeah, it was pretty long.
John:
There's some downtime sections there, but it's good to see the whole thing to see how Google is presenting its face to the world.
John:
That middle section on Duplex really was the important part, though.
John:
There's just a few odds and end here.
John:
One of them is about that Google is now on the bandwagon with their assistant where they have a
John:
like what do they call it uh continued conversation where you don't have to say hey dingus in front of every single command you say hey dingus and then a command and then it's still listening to you for a little period of time so i think you know i think we talked about that with amazon a couple months ago uh and then now google uh has got it i'm sure apple will have it in like six to eight years so it'll be fine um
John:
compound commands was something that they demoed um and we talked about that as well of being able to you know say play the song and turn the volume up which is something that homepod can already do and at least in the domain of uh of music google was showing off particular how they handle uh interesting compounds this is this was a good demo of where
John:
uh it seems like an easy problem because you just look for like an and or something and then you know where uh to split the thing up but they showed two commands that if you just blindly split an and it would get the wrong answer so it has to again has to understand the sentences and understand this is part one of the command and this is the second command as opposed to a compound command that is applying to two things that are anded in it so i thought that was neat um
John:
um and like i said that's an area where i think uh home pod actually can do that in the limited domain of music although probably not as sophisticated as uh as google assistant can do um there was pretty please mode which this is starting to get into google's sort of lifestyle part where they're trying to this is interesting apple does this a little bit but nintendo does a little bit too this is the first time i'd really seen google leaning on this
John:
The idea that we make electronics and software and servers, and we recognize that sometimes people use our products more than they want to.
John:
I don't know how else to phrase that.
John:
We make things, and we give them to you, and you can use them, but sometimes you feel bad like you're using them too much.
John:
I'm on my phone too much.
John:
I spend too long browsing the web, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know whatever it may be although i would imagine that like for the audio things no one is like this is a great stereo system but we also have a feature just in case you feel guilty for listening to too much music every once in a while our stereo will come on and say you've been listening to music for about an hour are you sure you don't want to stop and go outside that doesn't happen with stereo systems for the most part but for products like like a lot of the products that google and apple and lots of other tech companies make
John:
that is a common feature nintendo's consoles for a little while now have said you've been playing games for two hours maybe you should get up and stretch or go outside because the perception is that if you play games for two hours maybe you should take a break but no one wants a stereo that says you've been listening to music for two hours maybe you should take a break anyway google has a whole wing of their products now that's like
John:
You seem like you've been using your phone a lot.
John:
Maybe you should do something else for a little while.
John:
And they call this digital well-being.
John:
And there's another feature about that that I'll get to in a second.
John:
But the pretty please mode is similar to that in that say you are someone who has a bunch of cylinders in your house like all of us do.
John:
And you have kids like all of us do.
John:
And the kids talk to the cylinders.
John:
There is this...
John:
I'm not going to say alarmist parenting.
John:
You know, parents are alarmed about many things.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
What's happening to our children?
John:
Something is different in my children's life than was in my life.
John:
Are we accidentally teaching our children something bad?
John:
Are we losing our children?
John:
This one is, are we teaching our children to be rude by having them order around our cylinders?
John:
Like, my child is mean when it talks to my cylinder and demands that the cylinder do things, right?
John:
I think that's a little silly because if your child is a jerk,
John:
It's not the fault of the cylinder, probably.
John:
But, you know, parents have concerns and want to deal with it.
John:
And so pretty please mode is a mode in which your cylinder, I don't know if it requires, but it really wants you to ask it to do something in a nice way.
John:
And when you do ask it in a nice way by saying please or whatever, the cylinder acknowledges that you've done that and say, and thank you for asking so nicely.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't know if it's a jerk about it and says, ah, you didn't say Simon says.
John:
But the idea is that.
John:
our products are too efficient and little kids can use them and maybe little kids are being bossy so let's change our product to make it worse but make it so the kids learn politeness which as a parent i'm gonna say if your cylinder could help my kid learn to be more polite i'm not gonna argue with that but
John:
I think adults would not particularly like that.
John:
I wonder if it only works for kids because the Google cylinders can't identify different voices.
John:
And the other digital wellbeing thing was like, say it's nighttime and it seems like you're on your phone a lot.
John:
Digital wellbeing has a wind down feature that you can tell it to say, if it's like 11 p.m.
John:
and I'm still on my phone, please try to encourage me to go to bed.
John:
So the new version of Android will transition the entire UI to black and white
John:
to try to make the phone less engaging to you and it will remind you to go to bed and i love the idea of taking all the color out of your phone like transitioning your phone to black i'll be like ha ha you fool i used a monochrome mac for many years this is not less appealing to me you know how many hours i spent staring at a monochrome screen not even grayscale it's just black pixels and white pixels it wasn't less engaging you couldn't get me off that thing uh but yeah it's like google is literally it has a feature to make its products worse to encourage you to stop using them
John:
um and it sounds absurd but this is a thing i think people want because i think well i talked about this on directives like self-hacks sometimes the way you can accomplish a goal like i wish i used my phone less it's not by remembering to use your phone less but by in your moments of in your moments of clarity and rationality where you realize you want to use your phone less sabotage your own life in a way that will
John:
either remind you to use your phone less or force you to use your phone less.
John:
Self-hacks.
John:
I need to make this change in my life because if I don't, willpower alone won't cause me to do this.
John:
Like I said on the show, not having ice cream in the house if you're trying not to eat ice cream.
John:
You could just not eat ice cream, but it's much easier to not eat ice cream when it's not in the house.
John:
So when you're in the mindset, I really want to do this.
John:
When you're at the store, don't buy the ice cream because you know future you will...
John:
And thank you for that.
John:
Because you're like, you know what?
John:
If there was ice cream in the house, I would eat it now.
John:
But thankfully, before, I had the presence of mind to hack myself.
John:
So I suppose when the wind-down feature comes on, you'd be like, oh, but I still want to use my phone.
John:
But now it'll be like, oh, but my phone is getting annoying and I should really go to bed anyway.
John:
Just giving you that little extra nudge.
John:
So I wouldn't be surprised to see...
John:
apple introducing features like this because as absurd as they sound i think they're features that people might actually like and use i don't know would either of you would either of you ever configure one of your electronics to tell you to stop using it no i think i would um i
Casey:
I don't do the best with putting my phone down or away in times when it shouldn't be in my hand.
Casey:
And so, like, I've done a lot of these self-hacks with varying degrees of success.
Casey:
Lately, I've been leaving my phone on a different floor of the house.
Casey:
So when I think, oh, I wonder, you know, if so-and-so was in such-and-such TV show, like, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
I don't need to look that up.
John:
You should ask your cylinder.
Casey:
Well, and actually, yeah, now I can ask the cylinder.
Casey:
But I'm just trying to think of a stupid example.
Casey:
And so I've been leaving the phone on the wrong floor, if you will.
Casey:
Additionally, I've had Do Not Disturb come on by 5 in the evening.
Casey:
I used to have it come on at 10, which is about when I go to bed, except on Wednesdays.
Casey:
Hi, fellas.
Casey:
And so I've moved it up to 5 in the evening, such that basically once I'm home from work, I really won't be bothered unless somebody really wants to get a hold of me.
Casey:
And so I've been doing little things like that.
Casey:
So I think I would...
Casey:
And probably turn on these sorts of warnings or reminders or what have you.
Casey:
And do not disturb while driving.
Casey:
I think that's another good example.
Casey:
I have that on.
Casey:
And sometimes when I'm at a stoplight, I tell it, shut up and go away.
Casey:
But sometimes I see it and I'm like, you know what?
Casey:
I really should not do the thing I'm trying to do right now.
Casey:
So I would do it, but that's just me.
John:
What do you think about the pretty please cylinder thing?
John:
If you could put your cylinder into a mode that requires you to be nice to it.
Casey:
So given that we have a three and a half year old in the house and he I like to think of him as pretty polite.
Casey:
You know, he's my perfect little precious angel.
Casey:
He does no wrong.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I think anything we could do to encourage consistency on please and thank you would be helpful.
Casey:
And I don't really actually care if he says please or thank you to Alexa.
Casey:
But I do care that he says please and thank you to people.
Casey:
And I don't think it's useful to try to explain to him, no, no, no, that's not really a person.
Casey:
So you don't have to worry about them.
Casey:
But when you're talking to mommy or daddy or other people, you do need to say please and thank you.
Casey:
And so I have been meaning to turn this on, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
Casey:
But I'm on board with it.
John:
Marco, you're going to say please and thank you to your cylinders?
John:
No.
John:
See, if I think of it from the kid angle, again, parents will take anything they can get to help, you know, help along with parenting.
John:
Like you said, if it's going to make my kid more polite, great.
John:
But there is another aspect of parenting a child and, you know,
John:
in a house full of cylinders uh you know as preparing them for their future life and essentially making the distinction between something that's a person something that's not a person and i get that like the habits that you build on the non-person can transfer to the person but on the other hand
John:
Efficiently navigating a world of computer agents and stuff is a skill, and it's not particularly efficient to pretend the computer is a person, right?
John:
Especially for very young kids.
John:
I guess it's a fun thing to do.
John:
Kids believe lots of magical things, but at a certain point...
John:
the skill that you want your kid to have transitions from learn to be nice to inanimate objects to learn to efficiently use you know computers to accomplish tasks because that will be part of your life and even perhaps to the fact of learn to identify when it's not a computer when it's not a person on the other end of the phone line or whatever so that you can switch modes essentially and switch into you know you know last week's show was it uh playing the video game
John:
uh playing them like a video game yeah playing it like a video game because that's that's a skill you should have like you should understand how these systems work you should know that they exist and you should treat them it's not about being nice or not nice but it's about you know doing the having the appropriate interactions with them because the appropriate interactions like like what's next like you know put please in your google queries of course you're not because that's not efficient and you know google is not a person
John:
it's just that if you start making it sound a little bit like a person you know i'm not saying be abusive i think that was when the hell did that come up i think that was uh irl talk if you should be mean to your robot butler oh yeah yeah yep yep yep right like so there there is a crossover point where you actually are training people to be terrible to humans but i think the voice is not quite at that crossover point i don't know i have to think about it some more i would like to try it just to see what like what the failure modes are and if it is really mean to you and won't do what you said because you didn't say please
John:
because people do like positive reinforcement and if you say please and it's nice to you back that actually could make the product feel better to people because they're like oh my cylinder was nice to me right it's still it's already kind of nice it's you know it sets my timers and tells me about stuff that i ask and it's generally pleasant when it does it but if it if it congratulated me on being polite i think i would say oh i feel better about that even though i know you're just a computer program so that that could actually be a user benefit
John:
Not so much changing my behavior as making me feel better each time I use it.
Casey:
I totally hear you about teaching the kids the difference between computers and not computers, but at three and a half, I don't think that that's the battle I want to fight.
Casey:
The battle I want to fight at three and a half is say please and thank you.
Casey:
At, I don't know, five or seven, I don't know what the appropriate age is, I will absolutely fight the battle, or not fight the battle, but explain, you don't really need to say please to a thing that doesn't exist or that's not a human, but you should say please to other people.
Casey:
I do need to navigate that.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
I just don't think that for my particular family at this particular stage in our lives, I don't think Declan needs to be worrying about the distinction between the two.
Casey:
And maybe I'm wrong.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But that's the way I look at it.
John:
and also like i said if you know if it it really depends on your kids like we just had a sleepover party here with a bunch of uh 10 and 11 year old girls in the house and they love talking to cylinders and asking them to play music and they're all talking at once and they're all yelling over each other and they're all excited about what they can do and i you know i i can say i heard everything they said you couldn't help but hear them they're very loud it's a small house um
John:
And they were never mean to the cylinders.
John:
They were excited about the cylinders.
John:
They laugh when the cylinder would make a mistake.
John:
I did eventually convince them.
John:
I had to force them.
John:
I went to the room and nudged them because they were playing music on the Google Home Mini and the HomePod is like five feet away.
John:
And I'm like, come on, people.
John:
Come on.
John:
They're cranking the volume on the Google.
John:
The Google Home Mini is the size of like a softball, right?
John:
And the HomePod sitting there going like, I have 20 speakers that fire in a million directions that can adjust to the room shape.
John:
And they're like, oh, we'll play it.
John:
So I got them to change and talk to the HomePod.
John:
And they get confused about the trigger words a lot, which is, you know, they don't care about these distinctions.
John:
They just want the stuff to happen.
John:
Sometimes they'd both be playing at the same time or slightly offset, which was, you know, it was a little bit of a mess.
John:
Anyway, they were never mean.
John:
They were never mean to the cylinders.
John:
They never got mad at them.
John:
They never, you know, were bossy or whatever.
John:
And so I feel like if...
John:
It's kind of like if your kid was being bossy to their teddy bear, it's not the teddy bear's fault.
John:
There's no alteration in the teddy bear's demeanor or appearance that will change your child from yelling at it.
John:
The kids being bossy to the teddy bear is a sign that something else is wrong.
John:
Why is your kid angry?
John:
I mean, you know, whatever, like whatever the problem is, it's probably not the teddy bear.
John:
So if your kid is yelling at their cylinder, changing the cylinder to ask them to be polite is not is addressing the symptom and not the root problem, I would say.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have probably half an hour to an hour left of the show, so I think we still have time possibly to bring up the next topic.
Casey:
Let's talk about keyboards, Marco.
Casey:
There's a class action lawsuit, and apparently one of you wants to talk about it, and that is not me.
Marco:
I didn't put it in here, so it must be John.
Marco:
I was just hoping to say that...
Marco:
Apple gets class action lawsuits filed against it all the time.
Marco:
They usually are BS.
Marco:
They go nowhere.
Marco:
Class action lawsuits are generally scams because the only people who tend to make any real money out of them are the lawyers.
Marco:
Usually they're not news.
Marco:
I'm still not sure this one is news.
Marco:
But it happens to be on a topic that I talk about a lot.
Marco:
So I suppose that's why it's in here.
Marco:
But yeah, there has been a class action lawsuit filed in California that alleges that... So it's regarding the keyboards in the 12-inch MacBook and 2016 Forward MacBook Pros that I love to bag on so much because they are highly controversial in feel and attributes.
Marco:
And I fall on the they suck side of that controversy.
Marco:
But of course, they're also...
Marco:
fairly unreliable compared to the previous one.
Marco:
So anyway, this lawsuit alleges not only that they are unreliable and that Apple is refusing to fix them under warranty the way they should, but also that Apple knowingly put them in the MacBook Pros after knowing after the 2015 12-inch MacBook that basically it's legend they knew they were defective and put them in the other laptops and have been continuing to sell them anyway, even knowing that they would fail at a high rate and be defective.
Marco:
And that's honestly plausible.
Marco:
If you look at the sequence of events, I've been saying this for a long time now.
Marco:
Apple released a 12-inch MacBook, it had the butterfly keyboard for the first time, and those failed at a very high rate, seemingly anecdotally.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And you can say this is all anecdotes and everything, but that's all we have.
Marco:
Apple doesn't reveal these numbers, so it's all we have.
Marco:
You can ask around, you can hear on Twitter or stuff like that.
Marco:
And it did seem like right from the start, there was a seemingly unusually high failure rate on those keyboards, even the 12-inch.
Marco:
And this was a year and a half before the MacBook Pros shipped with them.
Marco:
So anyway, this lawsuit is alleging that Apple knew they were higher than usual failing rates and shipped them in all their computers anyway.
Marco:
And that does seem plausible.
Marco:
Apple might have known.
Marco:
We're probably never going to know.
Marco:
This is probably never going to reach a court.
Marco:
And Apple's probably never going to have any kind of testimony put on the record.
Marco:
Chances are it's either going to fizzle out or it's going to settle for some thing that makes the lawyers a lot of money and makes nothing for any of the people who have these laptops.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Chances are this will go nowhere, but I think it is noteworthy that it has reached this point.
Marco:
This is not the first time this has happened.
Marco:
Apple has had class actions in the past for various product flaws, some of them valid, most of them not.
Marco:
So again, it's hard to know how newsworthy this is or how valid this is or if this will actually change anything at all.
Marco:
but it is at least noteworthy that it does seem to be an actual problem what they're alleging is both pretty horrible on apple's part and also kind of plausible um so you know it's worth you know looking back on in a year and seeing where it ended up but it's probably not it's probably not going to have like you know breaking news all the time
John:
So the reason I put it in here, and I should have actually put the petition, I think there was a petition, online petition, change.org online petition to, I forget what they were asking, probably something similar like extend warranty repairs and fix your keyboards or whatever, and class action lawsuit, because lots of people send these to us.
John:
Hey, did you hear about this class action lawsuit?
John:
Did you sign this petition?
John:
Can you amplify this?
John:
Can you retweet it?
John:
Can you send it to all your people so they will sign the petition and so they will learn about the class action lawsuit?
John:
And I wanted to put them in here to explain basically why I tend not to do that.
John:
And I think Margaret explained it well.
John:
Class action lawsuits are not, you know, just because it's a class action lawsuit doesn't mean anything.
John:
You can sue anyone for anything, right?
John:
It doesn't mean you're going to succeed or doesn't mean that even if you get a big settlement doesn't mean that you were right.
John:
It just means that lawyers smell money.
John:
So, yes, this particular problem, like so many problems before it, has raised to the level where lawyers think and are probably right that they can extract money from Apple over it, which says nothing about the validity of the issue.
John:
We've discussed the validity of the issue at length, and my opinion of the validity of the issue is not changed by the filing of the lawsuit.
John:
Similarly, online petitions are an interesting signal to say
John:
Are people worked up enough about this to click a couple buttons on a web page?
John:
That's a pretty low bar.
John:
I've seen online petitions with 5 to 10 to 100 times as many signatures for a minor change in a video game.
John:
Just because people are willing to click on a web page and sign a petition doesn't really mean anything about the importance, severity, or correctness of an issue.
John:
But it's another signal.
John:
It shows that...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, it does mean that this particular issue, which we all think has some validity is getting traction among, you know, among more people than just a slightly bigger circle than just Apple podcasters, I suppose.
John:
Um,
John:
and you know all this signal like it's a signal to us and to know how things are progressing but it's also a signal to apple and i think apple also has a similar opinion on this class action lawsuits we get sued all the time yeah the some apple lawyer should come on and say how many times a year does apple get sued it's probably like seven times a second or something it's like how fast they sell iphone it's like people love to sue companies with a lot of money as the those are the best people to sue because that's where the money is right uh
John:
It's just a small input into their system.
John:
I think the class action lawsuit is a slightly bigger signal to Apple than the online petition, which Apple, I'm sure, is used to entirely ignoring.
John:
But they're both signals.
John:
And so if Apple wants to know how annoyed people are about the keyboard, valid or invalid, they can look at those signals and find out.
John:
But yeah, it's not...
John:
Class action lawsuits... It's hard for me to get worked up about any of these things, but class action lawsuits in particular bother me by their nature for the reasons that Marco said.
John:
It promises justice, but it feels bad to a lot of people that...
John:
the justice accrues in a very small measure to everyone in the class so great great you get a 12 check right but the three lawyers involved become multi-millionaires and like it just it seems unfair it's like one of those things where people like you did so little work and made so much money you shot on a movie for three days and you made 20 million dollars that seems so unfair but at least movie stars you understand like well people really want to see this person
John:
But no one knows or cares who the lawyers are in a class action lawsuit.
John:
And the fact that they get so much money out of it disproportionately to the people who are part of the class just doesn't leave a good taste in a lot of people's mouths.
John:
But anyway, people just want to see Apple lose a lawsuit or they want to get their $12 check and feel there's justice involved.
John:
And finally, on this topic, as I think Marco pointed out in a tweet and many people have pointed out, like,
John:
we all kind of know how this is going to go down like unless something dramatic happens unless like some apple employee comes out as like a whistleblower and says yes apple knew they were defect you know unless something very dramatic happens it's going to happen the way we always knew it was going to happen and that apple will probably do something in their future laptops to have a different keyboard hopefully it'll be better but you know they'll do something different right just like they did something different with the antennas on their phones eventually uh and like many other
John:
hardware issues they've had they'll probably do a repair extension program uh for these things and it may or may not be a good repair extension that may or may not leave a big like gap in the poor suckers who bought them at the wrong time and will never be covered uh and they'll move on with you know they'll live and learn right so i don't you know i don't think
John:
even if this class action lawsuit was wildly successful they're not going to say refunds for everybody who got who bought a macbook pro with this keyboard or you get a you can trade it in for a new computer or whatever like we we know how this is going to turn out with or without the class action lawsuit so we're all just kind of like waiting out this the the reliability of issues of this keyboard and hoping that the next one is better
Marco:
And the sad thing is, for a while now, I've wanted to start a campaign to announce to people on a regular basis here on Twitter.
Marco:
All Apple knows about, officially, all that's hitting them where it counts, which is their data and their wallet, is when they're brought in for warranty repair, when Apple has to foot the bill for replacing an entire top case for one dead key.
Marco:
So I've been wanting for a while to encourage people, if you have one that has a bad key, bring it in and make them replace it.
Marco:
So that way you are counted.
Marco:
Because there's a whole lot of people out there who have brought them in, who have been getting them replaced.
Marco:
There's also a whole lot of people out there who have flaky keys and just don't bring them in because it's a huge pain.
Marco:
And the reason I haven't encouraged people to do that, and the reason I keep convincing myself to not announce this everywhere, is because I know in reality, I wouldn't bring it in if that was my only laptop or my main laptop, because it is a pain.
Marco:
It's so disruptive.
Marco:
To bring in your computer to Apple, give them a stupid account with a stupid password so they can log in and do whatever they need and look at all your data.
Marco:
You should never, ever, ever have to give your password to anybody in this day and age.
Marco:
I don't know why they still insist on that, but okay.
Marco:
It's a pain to be without your computer.
Marco:
If you're buying a $1,500 plus laptop, chances are you need it for something in your life.
Marco:
Chances are you need it regularly.
Marco:
And especially if it's your only computer, it's quite an intrusion to go without it.
Marco:
I mean, look at how long I tolerated my terrible image retention on my last iMac because I didn't want to go without my main computer for a week, which is almost what it took when I finally did do it in the last week of the warranty.
Marco:
And this is another reason why, like, when people say, like, when there is a flaw with an Apple product, and a lot of times the defenders of this product will say, well, just bring it in.
Marco:
Get it serviced.
Marco:
Just bring it in.
Marco:
Just bring it in.
Marco:
And it's like, that's not actually a good answer.
Marco:
That's actually, like...
Marco:
Because most Apple products that I have bought, I have never needed to bring in for service.
Marco:
Most products of any type that I have bought, I have never needed to bring in for service.
Marco:
Bringing things in for service is hugely invasive and costly to a lot of people in various ways.
Marco:
The fact that it can be fixed in service is not a great excuse.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
I totally get why people would be hesitant to bring in their computers for service, especially if the first time they bring them in, they get the runaround from the genius on the other side after the pain in the ass of making the appointment.
Marco:
And then somebody eventually tells them, well, this is user damage because you caused the dust to go to that keycap.
Marco:
Like what happened to Stephen Hackett?
Marco:
I get so much why nobody wants to bring in their laptops.
Marco:
But honestly, if you can bring it in, if it's not a big pain for you, bring in any broken butterfly keyboard laptop that you have and make them service under warranty.
Marco:
Because if you want this problem to actually be fixed, we need to hit them where it counts.
Marco:
They don't give two craps about 16,000 signatures on a petition.
Marco:
They don't give two craps about people like me complaining on Twitter.
Marco:
They do give a number of craps about their spreadsheet.
Marco:
And so, you know, if you have one of these keyboards, again, if this is affecting you, if you can bring it in for service while it's under warranty and make them replace it, please do.
Marco:
However, if that's a huge imposition on you, I totally understand.
Marco:
So I'm not saying you have to do it, but if you can do it, do it.
John:
You can do the old people thing.
John:
I'm thinking of the people who, and this will start happening more and more, I assume, who go in with a broken key and their thing is out of warranty and they find out to fix their broken key, it's $400.
John:
Now they have to pay out of pocket.
John:
You're
John:
may or may not be able to yell and scream and make apple you know give you a better deal or do it under warranty this is assuming there's no warranty extension program by now uh but one thing you can do regardless of whether you choose to have the repair is go back home and write a long sad letter to apple to say
John:
Dear Tim.
John:
Dear Apple, I've used your products for years and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then I went in and one key broke and it's disappointing enough that the key broke.
John:
But then when I learned to fix the keyboard, they have to replace the whole top of the computer.
John:
It's going to cost me $400.
John:
This computer is only a year old or whatever, you know, like.
John:
like one of those letters and i mean like an actual physical letter but even could be an email taking the time and this is a good outlet for your anger to it like the company regardless of whether you actually paid it say you can say you didn't pay it or you can say you did pay it and it was a big hardship and you're disappointed and you're never going to buy our products again or whatever uh but kind of like uh you know say with uh you know
John:
political campaigns that a bunch of automated signatures is weighed less than a real signature is weighed less than a real handwritten letter you know like the sort of hierarchy of how much time did the person who sent this to me spend on it and how does that represent how passionately they feel about it and how many more people do i multiply this by to know like for every one handwritten letter we get there's 10 people behind the scenes who couldn't be bothered to write a letter i'd
John:
I remember my mother doing the same thing when I got my Mac SE30.
John:
And speaking of young hearing, I think I've told this story before.
John:
The power supply made a high-pitched whine that only I could hear because I was like, you know, 12 and had really good hearing.
John:
And the adults at the repair center...
John:
said this thing isn't making any noise and i felt like i was being gaslighted and i was like but this is making this terrible high-pitched screaming noise how can you not hear it and we went back and forth and the the repair center said they did something and gave it back and it was just as bad or worse and you know and so it was like this is all under warranty so we weren't paying any money for it but it went back and forth to the the uh authorized apple reseller as they were known in those days and still are i assume um
John:
uh back and forth lots of times and eventually my mother wrote a handwritten letter to apple saying we've used your computers for years my son is really into your computers we've been trying to get this repaired and we haven't had any success and they're kind of giving us the runaround and blah blah eventually we end up finding a different uh repair center that did replace the power supply with a new one that didn't make the noise but
John:
That type of letter, I imagine, goes a lot farther than a signature or participation in a class action lawsuit or anything like that.
John:
Obviously, Marco's right.
John:
The thing that goes the farthest is making Apple pay their own money out of pocket for the repair because that really hits them where it hurts.
John:
But if you can't do that, like, for instance, you're out of warranty and Apple's not going to pay for it and neither are you because...
John:
honestly i would have serious doubts about paying 500 to repair a key on an out of warranty laptop that's probably gonna have that same key go bad on the new keyboard because the new keyboard is the same as the old keyboard i would really think twice about that write an angry long letter you know you be polite you know you could say i'm not mad i'm just disappointed however you want to do it i think they will wait i think they will wait that a lot more than you clicking on that online petition
Marco:
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Casey:
I don't know anything about Surface Hub 2 other than that.
Casey:
The brief thing I read made it seem like a smart board to me.
Casey:
So what's this about?
Casey:
And can somebody fill in as chief summarizer in chief?
Casey:
John?
John:
Did you even look at this, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, I tweeted about it.
Marco:
Everyone got mad at me.
Marco:
All right.
Casey:
Anyway, what was your tweet?
Casey:
Why did everyone get mad?
Marco:
I basically said like I was kind of you know snarkily saying that like you know Apple and Apple's defenders have basically been advancing the argument seemingly you know either by words in the case of the outsiders or by inaction in the case of Apple that the Mac is kind of done and complete and there's nowhere else for the Mac to go might as well just it's kind of in maintenance mode and
Marco:
We can occasionally make good new hardware to make more money, but we don't really need to advance the OS meaningfully in any significant direction.
Marco:
And then Microsoft comes into crazy stuff like this.
Marco:
Microsoft has the entire surface line has been very ambitious hardware and software directions, ambitious new takes on what a computer can and should be, what it can do, blurring the lines between computers and tablets and things like that.
Marco:
Microsoft is doing tons of crazy experimentation.
Marco:
And yeah, most of it is weird.
Marco:
Most of it doesn't go anywhere.
Marco:
And people also try to argue like, well, look at their sales numbers.
Marco:
They don't sell very many.
Marco:
Look, I don't give two craps about anyone's sales numbers when I'm discussing what's a good product and what isn't.
Marco:
So there's lots of resistance to me saying stuff like this.
Marco:
But basically, I think...
Marco:
I applaud Microsoft for trying things like this, because there's this perception in our community that the PC, and by that I also include the Mac in the category of things that are PC and PC-like, there's this perception that the PC is just dead, or it's the past, or it's done, it's complete.
Marco:
And that's just so...
Marco:
short-sighted and ignorant we in technology always want things that come along that are new to quote kill the old things and the old things are dead and in reality that hardly ever happens in reality most technology that comes out is additive to what came before it like when you know phones came out we didn't all just move everything we did to phones we use phones a lot but
Marco:
But we also still use computers.
Marco:
And when tablets came out, tablets didn't kill phones.
Marco:
We just used tablets and phones and computers.
Marco:
And now we have smartwatches and smart cylinders.
Marco:
When the smartwatch was first kind of in its early rumblings, everyone's like, this is going to kill the phone.
Marco:
Everything's going to move to your wrist.
Marco:
Guess what?
Marco:
It hasn't.
Marco:
And there's no sign of that happening anytime soon.
Marco:
And so guess what?
Marco:
We still use smartwatches and phones and tablets and computers and cylinders.
Marco:
Now we're talking about AR.
Marco:
AR is going to replace everything with all this magic hardware that doesn't exist yet.
Marco:
But it's going to replace everything with all these killer apps we can't think of.
Marco:
It's going to replace your phone and it's going to replace your computer.
Marco:
You're going to be just standing there sitting in front of a blank wall in your cubicle and moving things through the air.
Marco:
And that might happen, but what's more likely to happen is that it's going to come out, and we're going to buy AR glasses, and watches, and cylinders, and tablets, and phones, and PCs.
Marco:
So anyway, all of this is a long way of saying that I think that the world of PCs and Macs has gone through a period over the last five to ten years of...
Marco:
creative rethinking by microsoft and negligent underinvestment by apple and that makes me sad because i don't want to use windows i don't want to use pcs i still want to keep using macs and mac os it does seem like maybe this is turning around on the hardware side recently and
Marco:
not so much on the software side, unfortunately, but maybe on the hardware side, we're getting some movement here.
Marco:
You know, the iMac pro is excellent.
Marco:
The Mac pro is coming, but you know, the laptops are kind of a mess.
Marco:
The touch bar seemed like their one experiment in this area and it wasn't very good.
Marco:
and it hasn't gone anywhere since it launched two years ago so basically my position on on the surface whatever this is called the surface smart board is this is a thing i'm never going to see in real life it's a thing i'm never going to use it's a thing that very few people will ever see or use in real life however gotta give microsoft credit they are trying to advance the pc in a way that seemingly no one else is
Marco:
So even though it's crazy and even though it's probably not going to go anywhere and even though their sales numbers are nothing to pay attention to, still they are trying to move the PC forward.
Marco:
And the reality is most of us still use PCs to do most of our work most of the time.
Marco:
So it benefits all of society that someone is trying to move these things forward.
Marco:
and unfortunately i apple's not really they're they're not doing enough if they are if they whatever they are trying it isn't enough so i i'm glad someone is i wish everyone was uh but ultimately the pc and pc like things are a part of our life they are still a part of our life they will be a part of our life for the foreseeable future and good job microsoft for trying to advance them
John:
Yeah, when I look at this, I knew what your take would be, and we've all talked about this before about how Microsoft's trying all sorts of interesting things.
John:
I think we talked about the goddamn Surface Book Pro, Surface Studio.
John:
I cannot remember their damn names.
Marco:
The Studio is the iMac thing with the knob.
Marco:
The Book Pro is the detachable laptop tablet thing, I think.
Marco:
Which one's the MacBook Air with the carpet keyboard?
John:
uh i have no idea i see it in the picture here i just don't know that's just a surface isn't it i have no idea i don't i don't know is it the surface air maybe i don't know is that a thing but uh but like with all these things like if to varying degrees sometimes like the one that looks like a big iMac it's like that's the thing that apple uh i would have liked to have seen from apple but for this particular one and for people who know we're talking about it's called the uh we'll put the link uh it's called the
John:
surface hub surface hub two which means there was a surface hub one that i've probably already forgotten about if i knew about it at all well do you remember what the original surface was yeah the big table thing i don't know i remember that um so these things are very big like the size of a television set uh oriented vertically in most of the things i see although they do rotate uh like like a big tv like a i don't know 40 something inch tv i don't know how big it looks like a 42 inch tv rotated into portrait orientation
John:
right and on it uh is running some variant of windows like everything else that microsoft does and it's a touchscreen and it has a camera on it i assume that's what that thing is it looks like the old apple eyesight it's like a cylinder it's like you couldn't build that into the display anyway um and use it as a touchscreen you can gang together multiple ones that have on where you can connect all four of them and show an image across all four and they always show it all sort of in the wall of an office where you can
John:
project from your little laptop-y thing onto the big screen and people can walk up to the screen and scroll and point to things and manipulate it on the screen with your two hands and it's really big like it's not the resolution is it's only like a 4k tv so it's not if you get close to it i'm sure you can see big chunky pixels and stuff but it's more of like a large display type device and unlike the thing that looks like an iMac when i see something like this i think it's not so much
John:
showing that they're trying new things in the PC space.
John:
It's more like they're trying new things in the tablet space.
John:
So if Apple was going to do something like this, not just Apple, I think the appropriate software for this kind of hardware is more like iOS in that you want something like this to behave like an appliance.
John:
You want it to have the less complicated, more reliable, more sort of, you know, less flexible, but more appliance-like operating system.
John:
And in Apple's ecosystem, that's iOS.
John:
No one wants to see a big setup of these displays with some weird Windows update message popped up in the corner, which I see all the time.
John:
Or worse yet, a blue screen.
John:
But, you know, just sort of the sort of Windows desktop PC nags about things that you have to do, right?
John:
And I suppose that dialog can come up on iOS as well.
John:
But, like...
John:
This should be a really big iPad.
John:
I mean, we saw that with Panic Software, their great status board application that they eventually gave up on after some struggles with Apple.
John:
They had a big television set showing the output of an iOS device showing status board.
John:
And this just wasn't even a touchscreen.
John:
It wasn't for input.
John:
It was purely an output device just to have a big screen in their office showing them cool graphs of information that's relevant to the company that
John:
that they updated from an iOS app that they wrote using a clever API, right?
John:
That looks like a lot what this is without the touching.
John:
This is adding the input aspect.
John:
If I wanted to have a gigantic iPad that I could swipe around on to show people things, you could gang together multiple ones of them.
John:
That's this.
John:
I don't know if it's a great idea.
John:
Maybe it's a terrible idea.
John:
Maybe no one will buy them or whatever.
John:
But this is a case where Apple is actually better positioned than Microsoft to field a product like this if it turns out that people want a product like this.
John:
Now, in this particular case, I'm going to guess that...
John:
There's not a lot of market for this, even if it is great at fulfilling its need.
John:
And every company in the United States has this.
John:
There are far fewer companies than there are people.
John:
And so this would be, you know, sort of an enterprise type sale, which, you know, is Microsoft's bread and butter these days.
John:
So maybe it is a product that will work for them.
John:
But...
John:
you know i it's it's not just about oh apple's not being daring enough by trying things with the mac apple's not being daring enough by trying things with the ipad either i think they're probably being appropriately daring with the iphone but for for both the ipad and the mac the mac seems not to be advancing just because they're like you know it's less prioritized and too cautious but then the ipad as many many people have pointed out over many many years
John:
that's not advancing either.
John:
And that's supposed to be the platform Apple cares about, like the OS platform that Apple cares about.
John:
Obviously, it's not the hardware form factor that Apple cares about as much, but it's the same OS as the phone.
John:
And so it feels like a shame that Apple isn't making.
John:
It took them so long to make a bigger iPad, and I still think they should make an even bigger one.
John:
Here's a huge iPad.
John:
And no, you don't carry a 40-inch iPad around.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
But it's mounted on the wall, and it can run iOS, and you can do lots of cool things with it.
John:
And then Pan can bring back status board, and everything would be good.
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
I simultaneously can't get too excited about this because as one of you just said, I don't think I'll ever see it in my entire life, but I also respect like Marco was saying that at least Microsoft's throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks, which is weird because I think the, the, the line that, that an Apple fan should toe is, Oh, they should just have an opinion and figure it out once and for all and go with it and not throw a bunch of stuff against the wall.
Casey:
But I think we're,
Casey:
We're so thirsty for Apple to do anything.
Casey:
The Touch Bar wasn't that long ago, but it was not that exciting to most of us.
Casey:
I don't even have one yet.
Casey:
I've never owned a computer with a Touch Bar even two years on or whatever it is.
Marco:
You're not missing much.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
And so I think we're all just thirsty for something interesting.
Casey:
And I think, John, you were right in saying that they are doing interesting things on the phone.
Casey:
I guess maybe they're doing interesting things on the iPad.
Casey:
But again, that doesn't personally affect me.
John:
But they're not.
John:
Like on the iPad, they've been so cautious.
John:
There have been so few features that are even iPad-specific.
John:
Forget about what the features do.
John:
Just how many features are unique to the iPad.
John:
There are not that many of them as compared to the phone.
John:
So it just gets like phone leftovers plus a little bit of iPad stuff.
John:
And what you could do – I mean, what you can do with a much bigger, more complicated iPad, what you could do with –
John:
multitasking that was more capable and flexible and configurable than the current split screen stuff which itself is a huge leap over like not having anything before or like having very primitive multitasking to make these devices more capable and we used to talk about them becoming capable enough to replace your Mac but at this point I'm saying just forget about that as a goal for now and just say let's you know they're so powerful hardware wise it's like that that power is being squandered to make a truly pro iPad and
John:
and yeah maybe make something that you can stick on a wall who knows but like they're not they're not really change in the ipad world is slow how many years did it exist before we got the the bigger ones and the bigger ones weren't that much bigger how many years did it exist before we got an apple supported stylus and even then it hasn't changed much since then so i'm i'm i think there's plenty of room for hardware and software innovation in the ipad realm it's just happening very slowly
Casey:
All right, so that actually kind of segues relatively nicely to Ask ATP for this week.
Casey:
So Ish Abaz writes, what would you say Apple's focus is at the moment?
Casey:
And naturally, Apple's a big company, and it focuses on many, many, many different things.
Casey:
And so I will even extend this to say...
Casey:
What is their focus and or what should their focus be?
Casey:
And I will start us off by saying I think their focus is pretty heavily on iOS and specifically the iPhone.
Casey:
I don't think that's a particularly revolutionary point of view to have.
Casey:
And similarly, unrevolutionary, their focus really, I want their focus to be actually possibly more than anything else on Siri.
Casey:
Because now that I have a competing cylinder in the house and a competing person in a tube in the house, it's becoming ever more obvious to me how much I really dislike Siri and don't trust it for anything.
Casey:
And I kind of hope they're focusing on that.
Casey:
And we'll see if they really are.
Casey:
Marco, what's your thoughts?
Marco:
First of all, credit to Asker Ish Shabazz.
Marco:
He's a really cool indie iOS developer, and you should look at his stuff.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Also true.
Marco:
In broad strokes, I basically have two answers to this.
Marco:
Number one, I think you should listen to last week's episode of the talk show with John Gruber.
Marco:
He and Ben Thompson got into a very interesting discussion about...
Marco:
Basically, where Apple's growth in their revenue is, is really in services.
Marco:
And if you look at how that services thing breaks down, number one is the App Store revenue, like their 30% cut.
Marco:
And then number two is iCloud storage.
Marco:
And so you look at things like, are they likely to lower the cut to app developers?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Are they likely to make better deals on iCloud storage or increase the free tier?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
And there was an interesting discussion about how like, you know, Apple in the past was all about like selling you new hardware, which the interests of like what's best for Apple aligned well with what's best for the customers.
Marco:
But as they get into more services revenue, those interests start to diverge.
Marco:
And it's a very interesting problem to have, probably not a good problem to have, where in order to make more from services, you have to start doing a little more user hostile stuff or taxing your users in more and more ways.
Marco:
And I think that's going to conflict with what's best for the user more often than not.
Marco:
But anyway, I think I can summarize this in part, what their priority is versus what their priority should be.
Marco:
I think Apple used to be a software company that was funded by the sales of their hardware.
Marco:
And I think today's Apple is a hardware company that just uses software to provide basic support for their hardware.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple's leadership sees the difference between those two things.
Marco:
But there's a pretty big difference.
Marco:
There's a huge difference between those two things.
Marco:
To sell good computing products, the software is really what sells them.
Marco:
For almost all these things, the software is what matters here.
Marco:
The hardware is nice, and it's great to have nice hardware.
Marco:
Good for Apple for continuing to make nice hardware most of the time.
Marco:
But it seems like the software is really stretched thin.
Marco:
Ultimately, it seems like Tim Cook's solution to...
Marco:
A lot of problems is just make a new hardware platform and then just throw some software on there that you might maintain.
Marco:
Maybe throw another app store on there to get more app store revenue.
Marco:
But how's Apple TV doing?
Marco:
How's the HomePod doing?
Marco:
How's the iPad software doing?
Marco:
You just mentioned they can't keep up with it very well.
Marco:
How's the watch doing?
Marco:
How's watchOS doing?
Marco:
How's the iMessage store doing?
Marco:
There's lots of app stores that keep being launched.
Marco:
Lots of new software platforms that have launched over the last five years or so.
Marco:
And it just seems like Apple has...
Marco:
neither the the resources nor seemingly the interest to maintain them and to bring them forward and to maintain quality levels on on the software side all they want to do is sell us more and more hardware here have have a dongle factory laptop this laptop exists purely to sell dongles like it you know your solution here have a have a home pod here here's a an expensive home speaker um that we're gonna put minimal effort in the software into and make it barely function with the assistant like
Marco:
I think that's a huge divide between philosophies.
Marco:
And ultimately, I don't think Tim Cook understands software at all.
Marco:
And I question how much Johnny does.
Marco:
And so the company is going to keep being run this way for a while.
Marco:
Ultimately, Steve was a software person who used hardware to make that happen.
Marco:
And I miss that.
John:
I hate any analysis of Apple that includes it being described as either a software company or hardware company.
John:
So I will set aside that.
John:
But setting aside that whole part and where Marco went into his usual downward spiral into being sad about Apple, I agree with the short version of the answer, which is where is Apple's focus at this moment?
John:
iPhone and services.
John:
That's where it is.
John:
Where should Apple's focus be?
John:
probably iPhone and services, and in particular, the services that have to do with voice assistance, as Casey pointed out.
John:
So I think Apple's focus is more or less in the appropriate place, and there are some tweaks here and there.
John:
But clearly, that's where it is.
John:
And all that stuff that Marco listed that...
John:
as you know is apple's version of let's see what stick maybe people want to buy iMessage apps let's try that or whatever it's like you know uh that's not where their focus is though they do that that is a pattern that they've done and it's disappointing to us who who want things to be either well supported or not to exist uh but that's not where their focus is
John:
That's clear.
John:
If they were focusing there, they'd be constantly improving it or ditching it.
John:
I could just answer it with one word.
John:
What's their focus?
Marco:
Margins.
Marco:
That's their entire focus.
Marco:
Margins.
Marco:
Talk about what does Tim Cook care about?
Marco:
Margins.
John:
I don't think that actually is their... I don't think the focus is margins.
John:
To do the nicer explanation of Apple being a software company, a hardware company, I think if you asked Apple, in Apple's best version of itself...
John:
speaking as an institution or any individual person who's supposed to be an avatar for the institution they would say that they're trying to sell you products like that it's the whole package the whole point of apples is the whole package like they make the whole thing and it's supposed to solve a problem for you it's supposed to provide an experience and they lots of their products have been like that
John:
the ipod is a great example portable music playing like is it a hardware product is it a software product like at various times you could say oh the software no one cares about it was all about the hardware oh maybe the hardware doesn't matter it's all about the software once you get to the iphone or whatever but like
John:
They're selling you products or solutions or, you know, there is a benefit that comes as a unit.
John:
And then we break it down into pieces and see how each part is being maintained and what they're emphasizing and where they're able to innovate and how software affects the quality of the product.
John:
And, you know, with the keyboard, how hardware affects your experience with the product and all that other stuff.
John:
But I'm not particularly cynical and pessimistic about software.
John:
where apple's heart is i think it comes down to uh implementation uh are they achieving their their stated and i believe a real goal to provide good products that people like um where where can they improve that but focus is slightly different i think what this question is is getting at but a lot of people are talking about it's like where you know we often complain about areas where apple's focus doesn't exist and we very frequently acknowledge
John:
that apple shouldn't be focused on the mac more than the iphone that would be the wrong thing to do like you know every aspect not just how much money it makes but in the end how important the product is the iphone is a more important product not just a more important product to apple but a more important product period than the mac it just is right and so if that's where the company's focus is it's in the right place and as we always say
John:
They're doing pretty good with the phones for the most part, right?
John:
So I think this question leads me to say that despite all of our complaining, Apple is focused in the right place, more or less.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Owl City writes, yes, seriously.
Casey:
Do you think the new Mac Pro will have only USB-C ports?
Casey:
I'm not so sure.
Casey:
I do think any new MacBook Pro absolutely will have only USB-C ports, no matter how much any of us, Marco, wish it didn't.
Casey:
But the new Mac Pro, given that the iMac Pro came with some old USB ports, I think there's a pretty solid chance there'll be at least one or two.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
USB-A or B?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
A?
Casey:
A. Yeah, it doesn't really matter anyway.
Casey:
But USB-A ports, I think there'll be a couple on there.
Casey:
But I think it will be very heavy on USB-C, unless obviously they go ARM, in which all bets are off.
Casey:
But I don't think that's going to happen.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
Can you clarify?
John:
Did you ever get a clarification of what this question actually means?
John:
Because I think there'll be a power plug on it.
Casey:
Well, I mean, what does this mean?
Casey:
Come on, man.
Casey:
Come on.
John:
Well, we don't have them on the MacBook.
Marco:
You'll just have power over USB PD.
John:
But I'm saying the Mac Pro will have a power plug.
John:
It won't be powered by USB-C.
John:
I'm going to come out on a limb and say that.
John:
um yeah they they just mean like will it have any usb port that is not a c is that your interpretation of this question yes correct you can plug in any of the six usb c ports into the power adapter yeah i think there is a reasonable chance that it will have uh usba uh and the imac pro is the like that was my question i
John:
I forget if I actually suggested it to somebody, maybe to Gruber before he did his interview or whatever, but the question would have been, why does the iMac Pro have USB-A ports?
John:
Like, if you're going to get Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi or whatever, or Johnny Ive or anybody involved with the creation of this product...
John:
since you have to be so careful about how you ask things to apple to get any reasonable answer the simple question would be why does the imac pro have usba ports and it's a trap the question is a trap because the idea is they'll give you some explanation and the follow-up is how does that explanation not apply to insert product that you're angry about not having usba ports on right like that's how that goes but the answer i think is why does it have usba ports is because there's room for them and some of our customers want them
John:
And so I'd say, OK, so is there not room for them on your laptops or do people not want them on your laptops?
John:
Right.
John:
Anyway, that's how that goes.
John:
But I think that is the answer.
John:
The answer is that there's room on the iMac Pro and some people want them and they're cheap.
John:
That's another thing.
John:
And so they put them there.
John:
And I really hope on the iMac Pro there will be room for them because the iMac Pro should not be the size of a softball.
John:
On the Mac Pro.
John:
Yeah, the Mac Pro.
John:
There'll be room for them because it'll be big.
John:
i think people do want them this is convenient like you got all this space in the back of this damn computer you can't throw some a ports it's just it's just easier not to have to have an adapter and and they're cheap um so that's i would give it a 50 50 odds that uh the mac pro has usb a ports on it
Marco:
Yeah, I would give it almost 100% odds.
Marco:
I mean, because the iMac Pro has them.
Marco:
By the way, and I agree with you, Casey, that I think the likelihood of MacBook Pros being released that ever have USB-A ports are pretty much zero.
Marco:
I think best we can hope for on new MacBook Pros is maybe the return of the SD slot.
Marco:
And that's the best we can hope for, for the return or addition of old ports.
Marco:
So I wouldn't be hoping for anything more than that.
Marco:
On the laptops, you can make a reasonable argument that you really can't fit most of the legacy ports, including USB-A, with the current thickness of those cases.
Marco:
It just doesn't fit.
Marco:
The whole reason that we can have it on the desktop so easily is because Apple has made this...
Marco:
very expensive decision to tie thunderbolt 3 into usbc and to have all of their usbc ports except the one on the 12 inch macbook be thunderbolt 3 ports so therefore the number of usbc ports on any of their computers is limited by the amount of thunderbolt ports that the chipset can support bandwidth wise and controller wise so
Marco:
So that's why you have four on most of the high-end products, you have two on the lower-end ones, and you have zero on the 12-inch MacBook because that chipset doesn't actually support Thunderbolt.
Marco:
So on the iMac Pro, they have these two wonderful Thunderbolt 3 controllers that supply tons of bandwidth to those USB-C ports, but that's kind of a waste if you're using your USB ports mostly to plug in keyboards and mice and charging cables and stuff like that.
Marco:
I think it does totally make sense if you have the physical space...
Marco:
to include regular old USB-A ports that are not Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Marco:
Now, they could make USB-C ports that aren't Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Marco:
They do in the MacBook, but they could decide, all right, the rightmost four of them have Thunderbolt, and the leftmost four of them are just USB over USB-C.
Marco:
But I think they probably don't want that kind of port confusion.
Marco:
So that's why they restricted USB-C to only be Thunderbolt 3 on most of their products.
Marco:
But again, I think that was a bad choice, especially since most of the time on the laptops, one of those being used for power...
Marco:
At least one of the other ones is probably being used for some kind of low speed USB device, you know, or charging a phone or something like that.
Marco:
But anyway, on the desktops, they have the space.
Marco:
They already have USB built into the chipset that Intel supplies them.
Marco:
So like all they have to do is put the ports on the outside and run a cable to the chipset and they have ports.
Marco:
So it's kind of, you basically get them for free.
Marco:
So you might as well.
Casey:
Adam Rourke writes, with manual transmissions on the decline and fewer people eager to own them, could you see the option flipping from its place in history as the starting point for the cheap car to becoming a premium one for the upper-end niche market?
Casey:
How much would you pay?
Casey:
So to build on this a little bit, when we were growing up, even the youngins, Marco and myself, of the show –
Casey:
It used to be that if you didn't want to pay a whole pile of money for a car, you would get a manual transmission because it was between $500 and like $3,000 cheaper in order to do so.
Casey:
But now it seems like nobody wants a stick and it's becoming kind of passe or just like just antiquated to have one.
Casey:
So would you pay additional money for a three-pedal car?
Casey:
I would.
Casey:
I absolutely would.
Casey:
And I do think it is very quickly becoming either extinct or, as Adam said, a niche thing.
Casey:
I would absolutely pay one to two to three to four to maybe even more thousands of dollars for a car that I wanted to have a three-pedal option.
Casey:
But the more I think about it, the more I think...
Casey:
My very next car, especially if I don't buy it soon, which I do not intend to buy a car soon, although we might talk about that in the after show.
Casey:
My next car may not be a six speed.
Casey:
It very well may be my next one.
Casey:
And that's in part because I've had terrible thoughts about Alfa Romeo's.
Casey:
But but that's a different issue.
Casey:
So, yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I would pay many, many, many dollars in order for this to be a possibility.
Casey:
But unfortunately, it's not quite so simple.
Casey:
Marco, you, I presume, don't give a crap anymore.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I don't give a crap anymore.
Marco:
But I do think it's an interesting question.
Marco:
And standard disclaimer applies here.
Marco:
This is for the U.S.
Marco:
Things are very different elsewhere, where manual transmission cars elsewhere have had a much longer and more widespread lifespan than they have in the U.S.
Marco:
But yeah, basically in the U.S.
Marco:
right now, the only way you can get a manual is on a few very low-end cars and sports cars.
Marco:
And even the sports cars, it's getting increasingly rare.
Marco:
The question is interesting because it's kind of happening already.
Marco:
But right now, if you want a manual transmission, except for the very few cases where you can get them in lower end cars, you kind of do have to pay extra in the sense that you have to get it like a high end sports car to even have it as an option.
Marco:
I have paid extra to get a higher end model to get a transmission I like in the car I wanted.
Marco:
Now I don't have one anymore, but I'll tell you one thing's for sure.
Marco:
I'm not going to go back to automatic no matter what like that.
Marco:
That is an option I won't take.
Casey:
John, you're so cheap.
Casey:
You wouldn't pay any extra, would you?
John:
No, the problem with this scenario is like, could you see them flipping and stopping being as part of a cheap car and becoming a premium?
John:
The problem is that there is a very narrow window between the time when it's not a cheap car thing anymore and the time when it disappears completely, right?
John:
There's the tiny sliver where like, oh, we don't put this on the cheap cars.
John:
They all get automatics.
John:
And most people don't want it even on the high-end cars.
John:
But there is some small subset of people that are willing to pay a premium to get the stick.
John:
And that window... We're currently in that window right now.
John:
And I don't even know if it's a premium.
John:
Maybe it's just like a same price or a no-cost option.
John:
I think... Was it the M5?
John:
It was a no-cost option last time?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Most BMWs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is it.
John:
And it's going to disappear.
John:
It's never going to be the case where...
John:
It's available as a $5,000 option to $10,000 option on a narrow range of high-end cars.
John:
That will never be the case.
John:
All of the high-end cars now are giving up their manuals as even options.
John:
That's what's happening.
John:
First, it became a no-cost option, and then they're just like, how many cars can we remove the stick from?
John:
there are very few holdouts and it's leaving more and more cars the new m5 no stick option right we all knew that was going to happen right a lot of porsches are getting rid of the sticks even though they're they're able to sell more than probably any other car maker just because of their their place in the market so no it's it's not going to be like you know there are many things that will end up being a premiums on high-end cars for for a small number of people but the stick will have a very brief moment in that slot and then it will just disappear entirely that's my prediction
John:
yep i agree and it makes me sad the only place it will live on is in and it's not like a premium it will live on like like kit cars people who have kit cars and you know sort of outside the mainstream of regular cars where you're like i'm i don't buy you know cars from dealers i build them myself or do aftermarket modifications and stuff like that that's where the sticks will live on because forever people will want to like the same reason people like build and drive replica model t's like
John:
stick shift will never die in that realm it will always be a historical thing that people are interested in even people who are alive today like they never they never drove a real model t but they're interested in it because they're interested in history and then the whole class of people who they're interested in cars because they were the cool cars when they were kids that will never die and sticks will always live there and those that entire realm is premium in that everything there costs a bazillion dollars and it really has no reflection on like cars that regular people buy
John:
But setting that aside just for, you know, when you go to your BMW dealer for a brief time, you can get sticks as no cost option.
John:
Maybe there'll be a tiny window where you can pay extra for them and then you just won't be able to get a stick on a BMW.
John:
That's what'll happen.
Casey:
Sigh.
Casey:
I know you're right, but sigh.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Squarespace, and Aftershocks, and we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-
Casey:
Oh, wait, John, you never answered how much would you pay?
John:
Oh, I would probably pay like, you know, a thousand or two.
John:
I mean, the proportion wise, if I'm buying a twenty five thousand dollar car, we see that the absolute amounts are not that much, but I would I would pay a premium for it.
Marco:
Well, it's just it's I mean, this will get to what we're talking about in a second, but like it just so totally changes the experience of driving a car.
John:
It's worse on low-end cars because the automatics and the, God forbid, CVTDs are so much worse than the fancy car.
John:
Transmissions of the same kind, so much more hunting for gears, so much more weird droning and just laggy reactions to everything you do.
John:
i i'm reminded of every time i have to drive around in a rental accord even if it's the same model as mine i'm like oh god this car suddenly i hate this car this car that i like and use you change the transmission and it becomes something that i don't want to be in yeah it's a that's what that's what i'm saying like it's a it's a very very big difference in having the exact same car otherwise whether it's manual or automatic it it's a totally different driving experience so casey so what's going on with your uh car stuff
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So let's let's start with Casey's car corner.
Casey:
I got in my car.
Casey:
What was this Monday?
Casey:
I think it was.
Casey:
Maybe it was Monday after work.
Casey:
And it was something like 90 or 95 degrees out.
Casey:
And I very much wanted to turn the air conditioning on.
Casey:
So I did.
Casey:
and nothing happened the screen the little hvac controls or whatever you call them the the air conditioning screen showed that the air conditioning was on maximum it showed the fans were blowing as hard as they could possibly blow and no air was moving the fans were not on
Casey:
And I drove home like that.
Casey:
Luckily, I had functioning windows.
Casey:
Luckily, I don't live that far from the office, but it was a bit toasty.
Marco:
I mean, you could almost take a running leap out of your office door and land in your house.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it was a warm five minute drive.
Casey:
and when i got home i parked the car in the garage turned it off waited about 15 seconds turned it back on everything worked great and so far it has continued to work great since that fateful monday or whatever day it was but yeah just a new little thing for me to stress out about on my car wonderful i remember my air conditioning compressor went bad on my civic and we weren't ready to buy a new car yet so i just drove it for like a year and a half with no ac and
Casey:
No, absolutely not.
John:
It was rough.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Now, granted, you live in an Arctic hellscape, so you could probably get away with it there.
Casey:
But down here, we actually have summer.
John:
Summer is very hot and humid up here as well.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
You don't get to frigging tell me that I don't have winter and then say, oh, but I have summer.
John:
It is.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
It's not like you live in Arizona where it's 125.
John:
Your hot weather is just like our hot weather.
John:
There's just slightly more of it.
John:
It's exactly the same with winter.
John:
You get slightly more winter.
John:
No, most of your year is tepid.
John:
Most of your year is tepid and crappy.
John:
For the super hot part, go look at the weather charts.
John:
Your average temperature may be a little bit higher, but humidity, which you have too, that's what does it.
John:
When it's 93 and humid and you have 95 and humid, that's the same weather.
John:
It's not like you're 125.
Casey:
I'm so angry at you right now.
John:
My drives back to and from work are much longer than yours.
Casey:
Anyway, I just wanted to share that there are still continuing issues with my BMW and somebody needs to donate me a Julia Quadrifoglio.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
Somebody could donate you exactly the price of it and you wouldn't buy it.
Marco:
You still wouldn't buy it.
John:
Yeah, probably not.
John:
I don't know, man.
John:
And the AC might break on that after a year or two.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
I did see one in town, and it was a blue one, which is what I keep telling myself my next car will be blue.
Casey:
And this particular blue I did not care for.
Casey:
I think if I were to get a Quadrifoli, it would have to be the red of the one that I tested.
Casey:
But that being said.
Casey:
How does it look in white?
Casey:
Mostly not good.
John:
We have some white ones tooling around here, and I continue to think it looks gross in any color.
Casey:
It's not gross in any color.
Casey:
Your eyes are as broken as your ears, Mr. Syracuse.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
Someone around here has an i8, by the way.
John:
I see it all the time now.
John:
Someone must have just gotten it.
John:
And I don't think it could.
John:
Are they still selling i8s new?
John:
I don't even know.
Casey:
I think so, yeah.
John:
Anyway, that's an awful car, but it looks really cool.
Casey:
Anyway, I've seen this Quadrifoglio around town and I kind of want it.
John:
Speaking of cars you've seen around town, today I saw my first Maserati SUV.
John:
They make an SUV?
John:
Of course they do.
John:
Everyone has to.
John:
Is it as boring and expensive as their cars?
John:
I'm sure it'll be their best-selling model if it isn't already.
John:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
So Casey, so you want to buy the Quadrifoglio after all?
Marco:
Well done.
Casey:
I do and I don't.
Casey:
The problem is it's an $80,000 car and I absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, do not want to spend $80,000.
Marco:
So Casey, you want to lease the Quadrifoglio after all?
Casey:
Well, but that's, I mean, that's the equivalent money.
Casey:
You just spread out.
Casey:
No, that's not how leases work.
Casey:
Oh, whatever.
Casey:
You know what I mean.
John:
I'm not sure I do.
Casey:
Okay, so let me finish my thought.
Casey:
What I'm driving at, though, is I've been thinking a lot about getting, what would the price of a quadrifoglio be
Casey:
After a lease, you know, so this is a two or three year old car.
Casey:
From my understanding, it's they're they're having a hard time moving any of them.
Casey:
But I would I would assume the Quadrifoglio would be even worse since it's an $80,000 car.
Casey:
And since it doesn't have a good transmission, I don't have a clutch to worry about.
Marco:
and tires are replaceable and nobody wants to buy it out for mayo because they presumably can't run for more than 10 minutes at a time so could i steal one for like 20 or 30 or 40 grand you know after it comes off lease no first of all no so okay so what do they run new like 70 80 yeah all right even a terrible car you know it's going to have a lease residual of something like you know 50 or something like that so assume assume that the post-lease buyout price does
Marco:
Best case might be 40%.
Marco:
And that's the best case.
Marco:
It's probably more than that.
Marco:
So what's 40% of it?
Marco:
It's 40 grand or something like that, 35, 40 grand.
Casey:
40% of 80 is 32 grand.
Marco:
And that's really best case.
Marco:
That's unlikely.
Marco:
It's going to be more like 50% to 60%.
Marco:
And so you're looking at in the 40% to 50% range.
Marco:
Secondly, for God's sake, after buying a BMW and having problems serving it, do not buy an Alfa and like a three-year-old Alfa that someone else leased and drove really hard probably because why else would you buy one?
Marco:
Yeah, first of all, that's a terrible idea.
Marco:
And then finally, if they're having trouble moving them,
Marco:
you might be able to take advantage of the best deal in buying cars, which is lease specials.
Marco:
Lease specials are how auto manufacturers dump inventory of models that they want to move or to temporarily boost sales for a certain quarterly margin or something like that.
Marco:
So if they're actually not moving, which I wouldn't assume that the high-end sporty model is not moving just because the rest of the line isn't.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
But if that is indeed the case,
Marco:
the deal to be had is going to be on a lease special, not on some kind of weird off-lease thing.
Marco:
And that also totally avoids the issue of your maintenance problem with buying unreliable high-performance brand cars.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I shouldn't do it.
Casey:
I won't do it.
Casey:
But it's tempting.
Casey:
It is tempting.
Marco:
Underscore my name is T in the chat says, at least wait until it gets to beta Romeo.
Casey:
That is a truly terrible joke that I approve of.
Casey:
The other thing I wanted to share in Casey's car corner is I went on a test drive as a passenger in a brand new Jeep Wrangler JL, which is like the equivalent of saying, you know, an F30, if you will.
Casey:
And it was nice for a Jeep.
Casey:
I mean, it has all of the problems that Jeeps have.
Casey:
It's tall.
Casey:
It's slow.
Casey:
It's bumpy.
Casey:
It's not extraordinarily cushy inside.
Casey:
This one actually had manual windows.
Casey:
It was a brand new car.
Casey:
Sold in 2018 with manual windows.
Casey:
And the reason being, it actually makes sense.
Casey:
The reason being is because if you are the kind of person that would take the doors off, which I would be.
Casey:
And then it makes sense.
Casey:
You would want as little weight in the doors as possible.
Casey:
So taking them off would be easier.
Casey:
And having all the weight of, you know, a power window actuator or what have you and motor and all that, that is not insignificant.
Casey:
And additionally, it didn't have power door locks for the exact same reason.
Casey:
And I laughed about that.
Casey:
I think if I were to buy one, I would get power door locks.
Casey:
I would get power windows, et cetera.
Casey:
but i i respect those who don't get them especially if it's because they want to take the doors off um this particular one had the most it was it wasn't a beater but it was and it wasn't stripped but it was certainly not a high-end model um it didn't have the very nice infotainment so the infotainment was kind of garbage and the interior bits were fine they were not great they were certainly not you know of european quality but they were fine and
Casey:
This particular one had the six-cylinder, and it was decent from the passenger seat.
Casey:
But you know what?
Casey:
It was not bad.
Casey:
The one thing that I noticed that really bothered me, though, is that when Aaron's car comes to a stop, her XC90, when it comes to a stop and turns itself off, do either of your cars do this, John?
Casey:
I forget.
John:
stop start no thank god i have avoided that so far well it's actually you get used to it it's not terrible but when aaron's car comes to no no it is terrible you can get used to it but it is terrible i would disable it i would i would i would consider not buying a car if i couldn't disable it yeah fair it's that i mean
Casey:
We don't.
Casey:
So here's the thing in the Volvo in the warm weather, because we actually have summer here, unlike in Boston, what happens is the car will turn off and the air conditioning will still run for a solid couple of minutes.
Casey:
And then eventually when the car realizes, oh, the air conditioning seems to be fading, it'll actually start itself back up or perhaps not even turn itself off in the first place in order to get the cabin to stay cool.
Casey:
Meanwhile, the Jeep, and this is one of those small touches that is just indicative of the difference between American and European cars.
Casey:
The Jeep, two seconds after starting it, after it had been sitting out in the hot sun all day, we came to the first stoplight, it turned itself off, and the air conditioning conked out within 10 seconds.
Casey:
Now, granted, there was a button right on the dash, a physical button, which was a nice touch, right on the dash in order to turn it off.
Casey:
But it was annoying, to say the least, that we got all of five seconds of air conditioning before it just gave up the ghost.
Casey:
And that was too bad.
Casey:
Additionally, when we took off, the soft top was actually not latched properly, which was kind of funny because we were
Casey:
driving on a surface street so we're doing like 20 30 miles an hour i'm like man this thing is loud and remember my dad has a jk wrangler he has had older wranglers on and off my entire life and and so i know what a wrangler is supposed to sound like even with the soft top and i was like damn this is loud and then i look up and realize oh there's a little bit of sun coming through right above the windshield that might be why uh and so we had to pull over and latch it and then it was much much much better but
Casey:
It wasn't bad inside.
Casey:
It really is a lot nicer than they have ever been before, which I know is a low bar, but they're pretty nice inside.
Casey:
I would definitely like to drive one.
Marco:
You're really not selling it very well.
Marco:
Yeah, I took a ride on this Jeep the other day, and the interior sucked.
Marco:
The controls sucked.
Marco:
The air conditioning sucked.
Marco:
The auto start-stop sucked.
Marco:
It wasn't very comfortable.
Marco:
It was slow.
Marco:
It was boxy.
Marco:
It was bumpy.
Marco:
It was loud.
Marco:
The roof fell off.
Marco:
The doors were going to fall off.
Marco:
No power locks.
Marco:
No power windows.
Marco:
It was great.
Casey:
that is one interpretation of the story i just told that is not the way i intended it but that is one valid interpretation thereof